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If teachers are so valuable then why do college graduates need a union, or would even want a union to represent them. Aren't unions for blue collar workers.

In Calif they have unions throughout the state workers including engineers, nurses, and many others with 4 year degrees, yet the private industry does not. I remember working at USS when the union got raises they had to give the same raises and benefits to the non-union management in order to keep pay scales relative.

Not to be in disagreement but public unions will be the ruin of USA as we see it today. They negotate these contracts with elected officials in private sessions and usually only the fact that a new contract or strike settled is disclosed to the public. None or very little of the settled contract aggrements are disclosed. This tie is so strong that I bet you couldn't find one elected democrat to speak out against the union for even minor concessions.

If you want to see whats coming take a look at Greece or any other nation that can't pay the benefits that were promised. It took a bailout loan for Greece and when thats gone what happens then.

I wonder how many present-day "liberals" realize their philosophical ancestors--the progressives--were very big on eugenics. For them, it was almost as important a cause as women's suffrage or prohibition. It was a respectable progressive idea, until the Nazis took it to its logical conclusion. I guess abortion is the closest thing to it today.

Maybe not--but I notice you didn't claim what I said isn't accurate. You may not want to acknowledge the facts about who was promoting eugenics in this country, or about its emphasis on race--but there they are. And the movement goes back long before Margaret Sanger.

The early writings of American proponents of eugenics sparked a lot of interest in Germany. Later, under the Third Reich, eugenics came to be interpreted as a means of purifying the Aryan race--in a way that wasn't quite so nice as your definition suggests.

There, at first, the negative version consisted mostly of extermination of a million or more mentally ill and retarded, habitual criminals, and other "defectives." That was a sure way to get rid of those "inheritable undesirable traits." And the positive version took the form of government campaigns to encourage "Aryan" women to have more children. In some cases, this racially pure strain was even taken to special institutions and raised separately.

It wasn't really about disease in this country. Sanger and others like her were especially concerned about limiting births by black and poor mothers who couldn't support the children. They may have been well-intentioned or even right, but even so, eugenics here was always about class and race. And some of the same groups the Nazis singled out were also targeted here, although not for death. The two big Supreme Court cases on forced sterilization involved a "feeble-minded" woman (1927, yes they could) and a habitual chicken thief (1942, no they couldn't.)

Primarily because it's irrelevant in today's world

Really? It seems very relevant to me. Read post 1013. Also, after the Nazis gave eugenics a bad name, attention just shifted to contraception and abortion. So the basic idea is still with us.

if you have to really reach out to the Nazi's to explain anything, it generally means you got nothing.

If anything else did as much to give eugenics a bad name, I'd like to know what.

It was the same Planned Parenthood which had been devoted to eugenics under Margaret Sanger which brought Griswold, the big 1965 contraception case that paved the way for Roe. Planned Parenthood was also a party in Casey, the 1992 decision where the Court undid big parts of Roe but declined to overrule it.

It was Griswold where the Court first discovered the "zone of privacy" it relied on in Roe. Buck v. Bell and Skinner v. Oklahoma, the 1927 and 1942 decisions I mentioned, were about involuntary sterilization under state eugenics laws. Griswold, Roe, and the decisions following them were about laws limiting contraception and abortion. But the theme is the same--the individual's right to control their own procreation, and the limit on government's authority to interfere with that right. The Court treats it as part of a larger fundamental right to privacy.

how desire and longing in human nature can result in even the smartest people doing what you would consider stupid things

What does that have to do with educating people about contraception? If "even the smartest people" can ignore contraception because of their desire and longing, what difference does it make whether they're educated about it?

^^^^^I think late-term abortions should be illegal throughout the U.S.--that's too close to murder for me. But other than that, I don't have strong feelings about abortion, one way or the other. What I don't like is that the Supreme Court made up a constitutional right to abortion on demand, out of thin air. And 38 years later, we're still saddled with this concocted "right." In 1973, only about 15% of the states prohibited abortion outright. All the other 40-plus provided for abortions under some circumstances. Texas, where the woman involved in Roe lived, was one of these, but its law didn't allow abortion in her case.

If the majority of Texas voters had agreed with her, the law could have been changed--but the Court chose to short-circuit the process. If the parts of Roe that are still law were repealed, all 50 states could regulate abortions as they saw fit. The law wouldn't necessarily change at all--nothing would prevent all 50 states from incorporating all the Court's rulings on abortion in their statutes. Or, if the majority in a state wanted something more restrictive, it could have that, too. But whatever we ended up with would at least be legitimate.

Gee, then don't have one, silly. Seriously, it's none of your damn business if a woman has to choose between her own life and the life of a child, or the quality of the child's life.

I should have used the term "partial birth abortions." They have been against federal law since 2003, and I agree with that law. They are everyone's business, since they are criminal.

I will respond to any issue I please here--get used to it. My personal life and who I might marry is not relevant to this thread at all, and you know it. If you make any very personal remark like that about me again, I will report you. Mind your manners, if you have any.

That's exactly the point. It's law by fiat--in other words, a form of tyranny.

The majority in Griswold, a 1965 decision on contraception, said that "emanations" from the specific guarantees of the First Amendment, as well as from the Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments, form "penumbras" which help give these guarantees "life and substance."

These guarantees create "zones" where "privacy is protected from governmental intrusion." And these "zones of privacy" also exist, according to the majority, in these penumbras. Maybe that's more clear to someone else than it is to me.

In Roe, eight years later, the lawyers for Norma McCorvey (aka "Jane Roe") argued that a Texas abortion law violated the First Amendment Establishment Clause, the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause, and the Ninth Amendment.

The majority found that the "right of privacy" the Court had ginned up from those penumbras and emanations in Griswold didn't just include a right to distribute, sell, and use contraceptives. Mirabile dictu, they also discovered, crouching in those penumbras of privacy, a right to an abortion! And, of course, the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated the guarantee of this privacy right and applied it against the states.

Roe is exactly the kind of "substantive due process" decision the Court first engaged in in Dred Scott v. Sandford, the 1857 decision that helped start the Civil War. Due process ordinarily involves the fairness of (surprise) a *procedure.* An example would be a state law that said people could be jailed for a month before even being arraigned--it would deprive them of a fair hearing.

But *substantive* due process involves the Court in second-guessing the legislature, by saying that the whole substance of a law--what it actually provides for--is unfair. From 1904 to 1937--the " SDP Era"--it did that to more than 200 laws. These usually involved economic issues--at the end, some of the main economic measures of the New Deal. When an outraged FDR threatened to have the Court expanded from nine justices to twelve, it gave in and stopped SDP review.

After its 33-year bender, the Court soberly declared for the next three decades, in one decision after another, that it no longer did SDP--those bad old days were long past. But only for economic matters, apparently. It slipped back into its old habit in Griswold (although it denied doing it), and it brought SDP back with a vengeance in Roe. Liberals hated SDP when it was being used to strike down New Deal programs, but they love it in Roe.

Today, San Francisco has, in its desire to save water, mandated toilets that flush about 1-1/2 gals. of water each time they are deployed...... with the predictable results

Of all places to have that happen, to such a beautiful city. They'd better work that out pretty quick. I have some very fond memories of little restaurants, grand old hotels, Giants games, riding BART, art museums, the ferry terminal, sitting in a house on Tiburon looking at the lights across the water, sailing past that skyline at dawn, walking all around Chinatown when I was about 15 . . .

The only relevant question is whether anything in the Constitution prevents states from regulating abortion as they want. The Court had held earlier that the liberty guaranteed by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment includes a right to personal privacy. The Court had made clear that this right to privacy only included personal rights that could be deemed "fundamental" or "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty."

Some of these personal rights the Court had upheld related to marriage: Raising children; educating them; family relationships; procreation; contraception; and interracial marriage. In each of these decisions, the Court had explained why these rights should be considered fundamental, usually on the basis of their common law history.

But without explaining why a personal right to abortion should be fundamental, or giving any basis for that conclusion, the Roe majority simply said: "This right of privacy. . . is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy." And that arbitrariness is the problem--legal scholars have noted through the years that Roe's main holding is not supported by any legal reasoning.

Roe v. Wade is such a sorry decision that after the Court agreed to hear Casey in 1992, most of the expert Court-watchers expected it to use the opportunity to overrule Roe. But it didn't, at least not completely. It replaced Roe's arbitrary trimester scheme, but it left the "right" intact.

That's your opinion. But as I said, whether the Constitution guarantees any personal privacy right against the states depends on whether the Court considers that right fundamental.

You're confusing privacy in the sense the Court's used it for these issues--i.e. the right to be protected against undue governmental intrusion--with privacy in the sense of the right not to have a medical procedure performed in full view of everyone passing by.

Technically, it's not impossible for states to deprive people of even fundamental rights. But the only way they can is if the law which does that is *necessary* to achieve some *compelling* government interest. That usually means that no less burdensome alternative is available. And the burden is on the state to prove all that. When the Court reviews a law using this "strict scrutiny" standard, it's almost guaranteed not to survive.

Seems to me that was not only the opinion of the courts, but almost most sane person who aren't consumed with petty control of women.

I have no idea what "that" refers to, but I notice you choose to frame the question-- once again--in highly personal terms. It's arrogant--feigned moral superiority-- to assume that whoever disagrees with your opinion must have bad motives. And constantly bringing ad hom remarks into a discussion for no good reason gives away that you're not very well informed on the issue.

I can't imagine why the government should care if people decide to reproduce or not.

Then you can't have given it much thought. One obvious reason is that quite a few of the voters in most states--the people who determine what state laws say--oppose abortion on religious grounds. Observant Catholics are just one such group.

In any case, it makes no difference whether they *should* care about that, or whether you can imagine why they would. My comment concerned the conditions under which states can restrict abortion, or any other right the Court has said is fundamental.

No, I'm not, unless you think medical procedures are done out in view of everyone. It's all privacy and both scenarios are protected under law.

Yes, you certainly ARE confused. Of course both are protected by law. But the point that escapes you is that the ordinary kind of medical privacy you're talking about is NOT a personal right protected by 14th Amendment due process, or by anything else in the Constitution.

If a nurse neglects to pull a curtain at the right time, or a doctor carelessly says something very personal about a patient where other patients overhear it, it may give rise to a tort suit--but not a constitutional claim of privacy.

I'm not surprised you think that, because you don't understand the issue. Read on.

I'm not sure where I made any assertions of rights to a particular Amendment.

I never said you did. I said you were conflating two different types of privacy right.

"You're confusing privacy in the sense the Court's used it for these issues--i.e. the right to be protected against undue governmental intrusion--with privacy in the sense of the right not to have a medical procedure performed in full view of everyone passing by."

I'd already explained in a long post how the Court has said the Constitution is the source of the first type of privacy right. I even listed the personal privacy rights related to marriage that the Court has recognized as fundamental. The source of these fundamental privacy rights is the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. And all but one of them--the right to abortion--don't even concern medical procedures.

You seem to imagine that because both the right to abortion and the other personal privacy right you brought up happen to apply to medical procedures, they must be the same. Not so. You obviously have been confusing the constitutionally-based rights to privacy with the garden-variety privacy right I contrasted them with in a couple examples, using your medical setting. These rights, which can come up in all sorts of contexts, including medicine, are covered by state tort law and don't raise any constitutional issues.

^^^^^I wonder if you'd think this was all so cut and dried if someday President Palin told her Justice Department to stop enforcing Roe. Why not? After all, our current president has told his A.G. not to defend cases involving a main part of the Defense of Marriage Act. Mr. Holder also refuses to enforce federal voter intimidation laws against black defendants. This administration is also ignoring federal court rulings that the individual mandate in Obamacare is unconstitutional. Two can play at that game.

Unless she can get enough congresscritters to agree, she can't change the law.

You don't say. And why is that? Mr. Obama is living proof that a U.S. president can interpret the Constitution other than the way the Court has interpreted it. That's just what he's doing with the DOMA. And you're applauding him for ignoring a federal district court's ruling on this mandate.

He's also flouting the Constitution by granting hundreds of persons waivers from Obamacare. Nothing gives a president authority to exempt only certain persons from the operation of a law. He's not some ancient king dispensing with the law for this or that favorite.

they will quickly find out what women really think about having their rights taken away.

I don't see any reason to be sure abortion laws would change much. If Roe were ever overturned, nothing would prevent any state from enacting laws that provided for abortion on demand, just as exists today. Let the majority in each state vote for what it wants.

If that's the only part of the legislation that gets tossed out in court

Can't happen that way. The Obamacare law doesn't contain any severability clause--if one part's unconstitutional, it all is. It hardly matters, because without the mandate the rest of the scheme couldn't work anyway.

The Court may never decide this law--if a Republican president were elected next year, and the Republicans picked up six seats in the Senate (which is not unlikely) the law could be repealed.

But if the Court *should* decide it, Justice Kennedy would probably be the deciding vote. It's anyone's guess how he'd see it, but upholding this law would call for a more radical interpretation of the Commerce Clause than the Court has ever made.

And how could the Court narrow its holding to just health insurance?---what basis would it have for doing that? To uphold this mandate would be to say that Congress can force people to buy certain goods and services, or prohibit them from doing that, under threat of criminal penalties.

Once that principle were established, I can't see what would prevent it from applying to food, clothing, shelter, energy, transportation--every good and service imaginable. And if there were central control of the consumption of things, obviously that control would also have to extend to the production of those things.

There should also be a law against using union DUES for campaign contribution

I think private unions should have that right, just like corporations do--they're just groups of people, like any organization. If they think certain candidates are most likely to push for policies that benefit them, they're free to pay their own money to help elect those candidates.

But when it comes to public employee unions, I agree 100%. The money they donate comes entirely from tax revenues. It's spent to make it more likely that officials who will increase public employees' compensation will be elected. So any benefit goes to those employees; but the cost of it is borne by taxpayers who are mostly *not* public employees. It's a scheme for recycling taxes in a way that screws the taxpayers.

^^^^^^And to hell with the First Amendment. Contributions Americans make to political campaigns have been protected speech for a long time now. That includes labor unions and corporations, and the wealthy--and it should. What's next--preventing newspapers from endorsing candidates because they're owned by corporations?

As for meetings, where does that stop? Say a few congressmen who are longtime friends meet for dinner at one of their homes to talk about their upcoming fishing trip. For one minute out of their two hours of conversation, a political issue is mentioned in passing. Should they have to record everything? And if they wanted to talk shop, what would stop them from doing it before they started recording?

Institutions shouldn't be afforded free speech rights for the simple fact that they are not persons

The Supreme Court doesn't agree with you. I can't think of anything it gives more constitutional protection than political speech. It's very well established that corporations and unions are legal persons. Maybe you also want the Sierra Club and AARP and NARAL to be prohibited from contributing to political campaigns because they speak for more than one individual.

I can't imagine how accumulating wealth could cripple the national economy. Do you think wealthy people don't use their wealth? It's working all the time--as land that's yielding rents, as improvements built on that land, as money loaned to all sorts of other people, at interest, to buy new machinery, expand their plants, hire more employees, develop new technologies, buy houses, and in all sorts of other ways.

I don't care if it's one person or a thousand making the decisions on how best to make a given amount of wealth yield profits. And I don't care how well anyone lives--they can only eat so much, or drive one car, or live in one house, or fly one plane at a time. Whatever they spend on themselves creates even more work--productive work--for all kinds of other people.

Just because you finally got your legislators from the bench, don't think it will last long.

I'm assuming that's a reference to Citizens United. If so, your prediction's completely uninformed. If you'd read the decision, you'd know the Court, as it usually does, reviewed its other related decisions. They show that for a long time, the Court has recognized campaign contributions by corporations, as a general principle, as speech protected by the First Amendment. That's not even open to question.

It's understanding what the Pursuit of Happiness really means. It's opportunity, given to all because we are free to act on what we desire, but all individuals are not equal, and will not all be able to succeed at what they want.

JD, it's good to see you back on here--hope everything's going well.

You hit it right on the head. You may know that John Locke had listed "life, liberty, and property" as inalienable rights we're all created with, and that in the Declaration, Jefferson purposely changed "property" to "the pursuit of happiness." And he meant happiness in the earlier sense of good fortune or prosperity.

It points up how much at odds leftists who push for equal *outcomes* instead of equal *opportunities* are with the ideas this country was founded on. They're in the wrong country. Equal outcomes are more what the French Revolution was about, and later what the Soviet Union was supposed to be about.

I'm not sure why Libya's internal affairs affect U.S. interests. Nobody seemed to think Ghadaffi was any great threat for a long time before this resistance began. Why did he suddenly become one then? This president is even more feckless than Jimmy Carter--he's now managed to get into this too late, and with no clear way to get out of it.

A no-fly zone won't do that much--imposing one for ten years over most of Iraq was mostly just an annoyance to Saddam. And even while the n0-fly zone was in effect over the south of Iraq, he still was able to slaughter God knows how many Shiites there.

So apparently the plan includes attacks on tanks, artillery, etc. Ghadaffi might move east to attack the insurgents. But the Libyan military would probably have some antiaircraft weapons going along to protect them. What's Mr. Obama prepared to do, I wonder, if a plane or helicopter's lost and crewmen captured?